Tuesday, 15 March 2016

London's Great Stinks, Cholera, and John Snow

Between 1800 and 1860, London's population grew from 1 to 3 million. Sanitation lagged far behind growth. Wells were contaminated by overflowing and leaking privies. Streets were full of human and animal wastes. The Thames was a giant sewer, fed by the smaller sewers under the streets. It was also the major source of drinking water, as illustrated in George Cruikshank's cartoon of 1832.

By mid-century, the river had become so, pardon me, shitty, that summers were often marked by what were called "Great Stinks." The stinks sometimes coincided with severe cholera epidemics. In one such epidemic, in 1849, John Snow argued that cholera was spread through foul drinking water. In 1855, he demonstrated it through a pioneering epidemiological investigation of cholera deaths in one neighborhood in Soho, where most victims had drunk water from a pump on Broad (now Broadwick) St. (Image: John Snow)

Few people paid much attention to Snow's work at the time but lots noticed the evil stink of the Thames. Scientist Michael Faraday, wrote to the Times pointing out the necessity of cleaning up the river. The whole of the river, he said, was an opaque brown fluid, a fermenting feculent sewer. The satirical magazine Punchpublished the cartoon below of Faraday introducing himself to a crap-covered god of the river, Father Thames.

Nothing happened at the time, but three years later, in the summer of 1858, another Great Stink aroused Parliament to action. The parliament building was right next to the river and the MPs found the smell intolerable. They passed an act to lay a new sewer system dumping wastes in the country instead of the river. Within a few years the Thames was much cleaner, and the health of the population improved. Punch saluted the improvement with a cartoon of Father Thames cleaned up and robust.

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About Me

Following more than thirty years as a history professor, I am now doing freelance writing, editing, speaking, and consulting. I received my PhD. from
the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught history at the College of
Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina from 1974 until 2008.

My most recent non-fiction work,
Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) has received excellent reviews and was a co-winner of the SHEAR
Prize (2012) for best book on the history of the early American republic.

I have reviewed manuscripts for journals and academic publishers and
have consulted or done research on various historical projects for individuals,educational television,and organizations, including most recently, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Atlantic Studies, South Carolina Educational Television, and University of South Carolina Press.

I have recently completed a novel of the American Revolution entitled Garden of Liberty and am working on a second novel, about a London physician and the body snatching trade in the 1790's, tentatively entitled Wells of Death.

SKILLS: Writing, Editing, Researching, Consulting, Teaching, Public Speaking. AWARDS, PRIZES, HONORS: SHEAR Best Book Prize, Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, 2012, co-winner.Distinguished Professor, College of Charleston, 2002Governor’s Distinguished Professor, College of Charleston, 1998South Carolina Historical Association, Prize for Best Paper published in Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association, 1993-94Distinguished Teaching Award, College of Charleston, 1985

MAJOR PUBLICATIONS: Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Associate Editor, South Carolina Encyclopedia. Responsible for hundreds of entries on medicine and science, many of which I wrote myself. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.

Moonlight, Magnolias, and Madness: Insanity in South Carolina from the Colonial to the Progressive Eras. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.